Stuff to read while you're eating your cereal. A blog on history, archaeology, science, technology, and whatever else I happen to be interested in. Be sure to follow me on Twitter! @ModernCerealBox

Autonomous Car

Google’s latest creation is a car that can drive itself. The car has built in radar sensors, as well as a 3-D camera mounted on the roof that can see in all directions for 200 feet. The new car apparently reacts faster to changes in environment than a human driver could. The car still has a manual override, in case the computer should malfunction. It also lets the person in the passenger seat monitor the systems. Google has already test driven seven of these test cars for a thousand miles without human intervention, and for 140,000 miles more with only occasional intervention.

Google argues that these new cars will improve safety conditions on the roads, since the cars themselves will never get tired or drunk, and the computer can keep track of everything for 360 degrees, which a human could never do. These cars are still years from mass production, but Google has big plans for the future. Maybe in a few decades, people will be reading in history books about how people used to manually drive their cars.